Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings

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СКАЧАТЬ home states, that they would be a more mobile group, moving in search of opportunities. The VA would be better equipped to handle a population no longer rooted in a single place.⁸¹

      On the other side of the coin, McNutt argued for a single rehabilitation program for all disabled citizens. He maintained that one of the central difficulties of expanding rehabilitation to meet wartime needs would be in recruiting trained rehabilitation counselors. “This shortage,” he concluded, “will be particularly serious if two agencies are separately established.” McNutt suggested that no proposal for rehabilitation, whether for civilians and veterans or veterans alone, would establish new training facilities. Instead, rehabilitation programs would use existing training schools and programs. He noted, “It is, of course, a matter of judgment for the Congress as to whether there shall be an integration of training facilities by one Federal agency or by two Federal agencies.” Downplaying the degree to which a universal rehabilitation program would dispense veterans’ benefits, McNutt suggested, such a program would merely be guaranteeing veterans access to a program open to all disabled citizens even if a veteran’s home state had exhausted annual appropriations or lacked appropriate facilities for the individual’s training plan. But he conceded that the VA should determine eligibility for veterans with service-connected disabilities to “do away with any argument that might come afterward” and noted that training allowances legislated for these disabled veterans would be handled by the VA. Finally, McNutt argued that establishing separate programs for veterans and civilians would “unquestionably hamper the rapid and effective development of the general rehabilitation program which is today so vital.”⁸²

      While they were not on the same page about the particulars, McNutt and Hines agreed that the need to expand rehabilitation was a pressing problem. McNutt argued that the need for labor on the home front demanded the “immediate expansion” of the national rehabilitation program, “not as a social gain, but as a wartime necessity.” He referenced the “startling increase in disability”—the threat of civilian casualties in a total war and the reality that the army was discharging thirty-five hundred soldiers a month for disability and that industrial accidents on the home front were mounting in the war economy. Finally, he asserted that rehabilitation, in expanding the nation’s manpower, represented “a direct contribution to wartime activity.”⁸³ Unlike McNutt, Hines’s commitment to rehabilitation focused on the nation’s responsibility to its soldiers and the need to incentivize work over pensions. He maintained that the nation needed a program “to fit [disabled veterans] for gainful employment” and that the lure of a pension should not be greater than the incentive “to complete training and get into employment.”⁸⁴

      The need for workers, and soldiers, had grown to such a degree that President Roosevelt spent considerable time on the problem in a fireside chat just days after McNutt and Hines testified before La Follette’s subcommittee. Roosevelt noted that the nation was “becoming one great fighting force,” with each individual—whether a soldier, sailor, or worker—“playing an honorable part in the great struggle to save our democratic civilization.” He said that the war was being fought “in airplanes five miles above the continent of Europe” and “in mines deep down in the earth of Pennsylvania or Montana.” The president painted war production as a central part of the war effort and necessary for victory, yet millions of new workers were needed. Essentially, the fate of the nation hinged on the intertwined problems of developing the nation’s fighting force and producing the weapons and food necessary for victory. A coordinated policy and sacrifice on the part of many, he suggested, would be required. Workers should no longer follow their whims about where to work, employers needed to think of the larger picture when hiring, war-focused production had to replace nonessential work, and more men had to be freed for military service by using “older men, and handicapped people, and more women, and even grown boys and girls, wherever possible and reasonable.” Roosevelt called on Americans to report to the Employment Service to find out where their “skills and labors are needed most” and to be referred “to an employer who can utilize them to best advantage in the war effort.”⁸⁵

      Disabled people themselves also expressed their desire to participate in the war effort. The War Production Board, and its predecessor agencies, received around a thousand letters a week from disabled people and friends and family members arguing that the nation, in the midst of war, needed to do more for disabled Americans so that they could do more for their country. Leonard Outhwaite specialized in services for individuals who were difficult to place in jobs, including people with disabilities, for the War Production Board. He would later say that the letters that flooded his office suggested that disabled Americans and the people closest to them “felt that they were entitled to” rehabilitation, that “it was the responsibility of the Federal Government in time of war to do something more for them.”⁸⁶

      Both the AFPH and NFB wrote to the Senate committee considering the La Follette measure, urging policymakers to consider the opinions of disabled Americans in their deliberations on rehabilitation policy. The NFB opposed the bill and chastised the committee for failing to include the organization in hearings. The organization argued, “The National Federation of the Blind, consisting of associations of the blind in the several States and being the only national organization of the blind, feels that it has more to contribute in the consideration of such legislation than any other group.” The organization maintained that rehabilitation should be administered by the DOL, using the Employment Service for placement. Any placement that happened through the rehabilitation program on its own, the organization asserted, would “probably consist of placing the blind in [sheltered shops].” Moreover, the NFB lambasted the bill’s reliance on “the sixteenth century pauper-law principle of individual need,” maintaining that “however broadly and literally Congressmen may construe the principle of individual need, our experience has shown that this concept in the hands of administrators and social workers has been narrow, restricted, and even niggardly.” Indeed, blind people’s experience with public assistance informed the NFB’s stance on the La Follette bill. In arguing against FSA leadership of rehabilitation, NFB leaders wrote that the Social Security Board and FSA had “forced a reduction of the standards of public assistance in many States” and had “saddled on the blind of the Nation a demoralizing and humiliating budgetary system by which social workers tyrannize over the lives of the blind.” This perceived tyranny led the NFB to call for “standards, principles, policies, limitations or control upon those who are to administer it” and a policymaking board with blind representatives not selected by the individuals who run rehabilitation. Finally, the NFB argued that the bill should mandate the employment “of a proportion of administrative and clerical workers and of practically all placement workers from among the blind,” declaring that “justice would require that the blind be given employment in an agency for their benefit and much of the work of such an agency could be done properly only if people with experience of blindness were included on the staff.”⁸⁷

      The AFPH, still in its early days of organizing and seeking the backing and membership of disabled veterans, wrote to the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in support of VA control of veterans’ rehabilitation. Moreover, the organization used the hearings to reassert its critique of “the lack of intelligent planning” by the federal government to utilize disabled workers’ labor. The AFPH’s national council argued that disabled Americans could and should be used to release physically fit individuals for military service or other war work “requiring full physical strength.” In particular, the AFPH offered a scathing critique of the WMC, the FSA, and the Civil Service Commission, noting that while the FSA sought to take credit for the growing number of disabled individuals in the workforce, the trend was the result of the labor crisis and not due to any “particular effort or design” of the FSA. Despite pressure from the AFPH and other disability rights organizations, the AFPH claimed, Civil Service Commission officials “still stubbornly refuse to map out and put into operation a practical program.” Additionally, the council accused the commission of perpetrating “a fraud upon the handicapped,” by encouraging disabled individuals to take the civil service examination but then refusing to hire them on the grounds of disability.⁸⁸

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